Accidents, and incidents of faults and failures are an unavoidable reality for even moderately complex systems. Accidents, though unfortunate events, also provide an opportunity to uncover vulnerabilities and latent errors in systems. In this vein accident and incident analysis plays an important role in improving system dependability and robustness. Incidents when analysed individually often seem to be caused due to isolated reasons. However, when incidents are analysed in the context of other incidents in the broader domain then patterns begin to emerge between them. These patterns may indicate basic and underlying reasons for incidents, known as root causes. The practice of analysing a number of incidents together is called Multi-incident analysis. The state of the art of multi-incident analysis is dominated by quantitative methods that mostly use statistical analysis to find correlations between concepts. These methods are limited in their ability to identify systemic reasons for accidents, faults, and failures. To overcome this shortcoming, qualitative methods are sometimes used in incident analysis; in an effort to acquire a better understanding of the incident space. However, these methods do not provide any methodological support to guide the qualitative analysis towards the discovery of root causes. This thesis presents the Grounded Incident Fault Theories (GIFTs) method for multi-incident analysis. GIFTs is a qualitative multi-incident analysis method that provides methodological support to identify root causes and mitigation strategies by analysing past incident in a particular domain. GIFTs is a synthesis of two methods: The Incident Fault Tree (IFT), which is a method for incident analysis and documentation; and The Grounded Theory Method (GTM), which is a qualitative analysis method for building theories and discovering insights about phenomenon through the aggregation of data. GIFTs merges these two methods in a way that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In GIFTs the Incident Fault Tree guides the Grounded Theory process to efficiently identify the most important concepts with respect to understanding and mitigating faults and failures.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:719799 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | Naqvi, Syed Asad Ali |
| Contributors | Rashid, Awais |
| Publisher | Lancaster University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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